Horsey Rites Of Spring

Spring is here, and at riding stables across the countryside, it's accompanied by the ritual of the school show -- just a little affair to get riders ready for the real show circuit in the summer.

On a recent Sunday in a freezing indoor ring, they started, as usual, with the tiny kids' horses on lead lines, the young riders not yet ready to steer by themselves, and progressed from simple walk-trot classes to Junior Over Fences, as proud parents shivered behind the cameras.

It's a strange sisterhood. What is it that makes little girls endure hours and hours in the cold, trying to muscle a huge animal around, being barked at by an instructor as they struggle to get their bodies to form unnatural habits, making the toes turn in, the heels stretch down, picking themselves up after spills and getting in the saddle again, being stepped on, bitten and thrown, all for the thrill of sailing perfectly over a piece of makeshift fencing with a box of plastic flowers in front of it? This is a sport that girls have dominated for generations (in this show there was one lone boy). If you think little girls can't be tough and brave, just visit your local riding stable.

And then there were the big girls: the grown-ups who maybe rode a bit when they were kids, or always wanted to. The afternoon was theirs. Children gone, one frozen husband and a boyfriend made up the thin audience for the Adult Walk-Trot, Adult Walk-Trot-Canter, Adult Crossrails and Adult Over Fences.

Forget the image of snooty people in hunting clothes. These were ordinary women, some in chaps, some in jeans and parkas, some of whom had jobs to run off to afterward, and who refused to let the kids have all the fun. For the big girls and the little ones, those National Velvet dreams just won't die